Letter From an Adopter
To our social worker,
I have been trying to stay balanced in my feelings towards the individuals involved in our placement/ pre–Adoption Order disruption as I choose to believe that every one of them had the best of intentions. It serves me no purpose to go down a route of blame and bitterness. However, I am angry, and I believe there is a point to this – I feel a sense of injustice and I am choosing to channel it into a campaign for change. I hope that by hearing me in what I have to say here, it might generate a change in your mindset when you work with future adopters.
It seems that you and your manager believe the narrative that is driven by the system – that the support currently offered to adopters is sufficient. In fact, during our last meeting where we discussed the report from our disruption review, your manager told me that my expectations of support were too high. To me (and I believe many other adopters and adoptees) this is a shocking, devastating and insurmountably harmful statement.
My expectation was that our family would receive suitable and timely support from child psychologists/trauma experts when we needed it during and after the children’s transition to us from their foster home. I also expected that the need for this support would be escalated when it became clear that our AS presented very differently to the information we were given during the matching process. I also expected that this was a rare case as such important information should absolutely not be withheld/grossly inaccurate (sadly this is now becoming a common theme from the people I have met through our disruption support network). Our new family had been let down by the system and therefore those involved should have felt a duty of care to give our family everything it needed in order to prevent or reduce the risk of crisis.
I ask you to read the list of my expectations that I have put at the bottom of this letter and sit with yourself for a second. Do you truly believe that these are unreasonable (- my interpretation of your managers statement that my expectations were “too high”). Do you really think that the system is currently supporting adopters and adoptees to build a healthy and happy future?! Is it possible that you and your manager are gaslighting me with the statement/view that my expectations were too high?! Could it be that a high proportion of adopters are being set up to fail due to the lack of timely and suitable support provided from the point of transition onwards? Could it be that the message of an abundance of support for adopters during our training was a grossly inaccurate picture versus the reality? And could it be that those supporting the narrative that my expectations were too high are adding to a much larger problem?
Although true and accurate stats are starkly missing on adoption crisis, disruption and breakdown, are you aware of a study by adoption UK that states that over 38% of adoptive families in England are facing severe challenges or in crisis. Do you think this is ok?! Are you ok with sending over 1 out of 3 of the individuals/couples that you’re working with into severe distress or crisis?
I had been open with you during our assessments that I had experienced domestic violence in a past relationship so being presented with a child who demonstrated CPV was particularly challenging for me. Although this holds enough significance to mention, as it adds to the theme of negligence and failure by the individuals involved in our matching process, I do believe that anyone who is blindsided by this behaviour from their adopted child as we were, would be struggling from the outset regardless of their background. It has become very clear that the foster parents experienced CPV regularly and that the withholding of this information led to us receiving a catastrophically misleading picture of him during the matching process. Whether the social workers involved knew these exact details or not, the lack of attention and assessments received by our AS over more than 2 years with his foster family is yet another form of neglect in his short life so far. Had this happened we would not have received such an inaccurate picture of the child we were matched with; in fact I strongly believe we would never have been matched.
It seems that I may have dented your ego by stating that I wanted to speak to a trained child psychologist very early on when we began to struggle. I beg you to put your ego aside and acknowledge that you do not have the qualifications or experience to diagnose and treat a child demonstrating as our AS did. There seemed to be a lightbulb moment during our last meeting when I said to your manager that none of the support offered to us during our placement actually gave clear and suitable guidance on how to parent our AS. As I have said, as a new adoptive parent, I am still unsure how we “should” have parented a child who seemed unable to allow himself to bond with us, threatened us daily, attacked us and his sibling regularly, had significant oppositional defiance, had significant sensory needs, displayed signs of C-PTSD and showed signs of potential ASD/FASD? I don’t believe you had/have clear answers to this. Yet you sat there during our disruption report debrief as your manager stated that we should have used your expertise more and that you could have provided all of the support we needed. We took all of the support you offered, and you only seemed to be able to listen to me and openly speculate on parenting ideas that were mixed in their usefulness. You were due to start weekly Theraplay sessions with us and you agreed to facilitate training for our support network (which hadn’t materialised at the point of disruption) but do you really think that being “trauma informed” is sufficient in these circumstances? Do you think you could have assessed our sons needs to the same degree as a trained child psychologist? Do you have expert knowledge of the different parenting styles currently recommended for CPV and oppositional defiance, do you know which styles are recommended when other neurodiverse diagnoses may be present. As I understand it, one parenting style for a child demonstrating CPV through PTSD would be unsuitable for a child with a combination of FASD and PTSD. Could you navigate that for us? If you could, why didn’t you?! And if you couldn’t, how could we have been expected to without expert guidance?!
I will always appreciate the seeming compassion and lack of judgement shown by your manager and you when the weekend after our “crisis” meeting I had lost my temper with our AS during yet another defiant and violent incident from him. On reflection, I believe this was my subconscious way of ensuring he was removed from our home as soon as possible. It was clear that we weren’t going to get the support our family needed, and I had reached a point of being scared of our AS which you and your manager were aware of. I was in constant survival mode. By telling your manager that I had lost my temper with our AS the following morning, I knew on some level that this was a point of no return. I take full responsibility for not regulating my own emotions at this point and I will always carry guilt and shame that I lost my temper with a traumatised 5-year-old child – the completely innocent party in all of this.
However, I will no longer let that hold me to ransom in some strange sense of loyalty to you and your manager, stopping me from speaking out and asking you to reconsider your approach when working with your next set of adopters.
During our disruption meeting your manager clearly wanted to make a point to those in attendance that you had visited us weekly during the placement to provide your support. This was not strictly true but I felt a loyalty to you that stopped me from debating this at the time. Your visits were appreciated and became more regular as things escalated but I have many examples of confused conversations, changed plans and a lack of reliability. At times you mentioned that you had some personal issues going on and if these were linked to your unreliability why hadn’t you asked your manager to step in and support as well. I know that vital information was missed in your weekly meetings with your manager (she did not seem aware of some key events when we met with her over a month after calling crisis for the first time).
As things got worse for us, it felt like you became more unreliable, and our conversations became more confused. In fact, one of the most distressing events over the whole placement happened when it was decided that our AS would be leaving us. The thing that was keeping me going was the possibility of our AD remaining with us. I still believe that this would have been the best option for her, I cannot believe that I am saying that as my husband and I were so passionate about keeping siblings together when we were matched. However, with the “benefit” of experience, our AD did not get a look in because of our AS’s needs, our AS would often lash out at her, with his violence towards her becoming her norm, and she had bonded with us and our support network. We could have given her a safe and loving home. I was just about holding it together when you came to visit, our AD was with me, and I quietly asked if there was any update regarding a new placement for our AS. Your response was confused, and you inferred that a foster placement had been found for both children. I had to question this and wade through the confused conversation, slowly realising that you were telling me that our AD would be leaving us as well. When I made it clear that this was new news you seemed unaware and somewhat oblivious to the bomb shell you were dropping. I will never forget the disbelief I felt, it didn’t feel real that things had become such a mess. The pain of losing our AD was immense.
Having received this news, every minute was a battle, pretending that we weren’t broken and preparing for the children to leave us. I was desperate for this to happen sooner rather than later, I was scared and triggered by our AS and I couldn’t bare to pretend with our AD, it felt like such a betrayal. You told me it would happen on the Wednesday. As you left on Tuesday afternoon, you said you’d see me tomorrow. I wrote a huge email to the children’s social worker with the children’s routines, likes/dislikes etc ready for their new foster carer. In the morning my husband took the children out and I packed the children’s “essential” things, this included a fair amount of their stuff as it was important to me that they had all of their material comforts with them immediately. This was such a surreal and horrific experience. I then met up with the children and my husband mid-morning. It slowly materialised via a number of emails and messages that there was doubt that the children would actually move out that day. Despite my desperation, the moving day moved back to the Thursday, and I had to go home and unpack the children’s things while they were still out. During all this my husband and I were distraught and trying to behave as normally as we could to minimise the huge inevitable distress the kids would experience from the disruption. How could this happen? I am still in shock at the cruelty of it all.
I take accountability for my naivety and for failing to regulate my emotions towards the end of our placement and I will live with that forever. However, the professionals involved also need to take individual accountability, stop hiding behind the system, gaslighting adopters and gaslighting yourselves!! This isn’t ok and although my expectations may have been naive, they were not too high. If adoption is to be a happy experience for more than 24% of people who have embarked on this journey (as AUK stats suggest at the moment), the current mindset from those who are on the front line, as well as their leaders needs to change.
My expectations –
- Psychological assessments and support for children as soon as they enter care and regularly thereafter
- Assessment for FASD in all children whose birth mother abused alcohol outside of pregnancy (it seems non-sensical to accept a statement from BM that no alcohol was consumed during pregnancy when there is a known addiction. I don’t know many advanced addicts who are able to stop their addiction for a sustained period of time however much they may want to. The shame of this and fear of repercussion means that any answers to a question from social services should not be taken as red)
- A long term, funded treatment plan with trained trauma experts and professionals who work consistently with the child. Including, across placements if at all possible
- An accurate picture of a child’s attachment style and additional needs (including FASD diagnosis) before matching begins
- Honesty and transparency regarding a child’s current behavioural and emotional development
- Honesty and transparency regarding previous incidents of CPV
- Suitable training and support for adoptive parents from the outset, carried out by trauma experts and experts in their field tailored to the specific needs of the child/children they are adopting
- A clear escalation process within social services if a new family is in difficulty, leading to additional suitable and timely support
- Clear strategies from experts in managing CPV and implementation of additional safeguarding measures from social services for the whole family if this is demonstrated
Written by Polly